New Founders Launching to Silence
New founders are experiencing significant anxiety and frustration around launching their projects. The core pain is the disconnect between the effort invested in development and the lack of visibility or feedback after launch, leaving them unsure if their work resonates with potential users. This highlights a need for better guidance and support during the crucial launch phase.
SOURCES (60)
“This is actually a good idea haha,I will do that maybe I'll have boosts of confidence while figuring things out Thank you 😊”
“No direct sales and/or advertisements for personal gain. This includes spamming. You MAY share your startup in the Share Your Startup thread (stickied at the top of /r/startups )”
“Exactly. It shows you can build something production-ready, not just make the basic feature work. That’s a much stronger portfolio piece.”
“Oh I see, like why are they using this tool when they’re telling you that you can build something similar yourself. Good software is still difficult to build is certainly the reality. Much easier and faster than it used to be, but still hard, and bottlenecked by having good ideas.”
“"Hosted 30 days, published once it's actually proven" is exactly the line. Good luck with the picks, the hour-a-week filter will do the rest.”
“I totally understand that feeling, man. Imposter syndrome is so real and honestly, almost every founder faces this exact same fear when starting out. You should be really proud because Journery looks amazing! Getting those first users is always the hardest part, but you just have to start putting it out there. If you ever want to check it out, ScoutVybe is always there to help you find some early users. Keep going, you got this!”
“the "8 completed launches" detail stops the swap. i'd lead with it, because the rest could describe Product Hunt almost unchanged.”
“yeah this is completely fair and honestly the participant side needs to be way more visible on the site the network is 100% real people. there are no AI agents pretending to be testers and we arent just hiring some random cheap offshore pool behind the scenes people join NearbyCrew directly because they want to get paid for missions. they build real profiles around things like location, interests, experience, work, products they use, skills etc then go through extensive curated training to make”
“But if you have a unique story, would it be best to announce it first? So even if someone else copies you, you can always claim you did it first? Am I missing anything?”
“This is excellent! Well done. It’s very intuitive & the UI is great. Why is this not a major startup, is the competitive landscape difficult?”
Thank you! It's great to hear from others that it's a useful idea!
“I acted as a manager for the projects with AI help. Mainly my friends raised a lot of troubles they met in their life, and then I'd see if I could solve some of them.”
“I'd be thinking about what makes someone stay after the first trash talk session. The avatar thing is clever but it's a gimmick unless there's a reason to come back tomorrow. The room concept works if you build rituals around it, weekly game threads, inside jokes that only make sense there, maybe even letting rooms develop their own weird culture over time. That's the stuff that turns a tool into a place”
“Don't know yet, maybe some additional paid service like helping with testing the business idea with this target audience, or some basic and premium report. I will try to test it with people to find out what they want/need help with.”
“yeah, paste the diagnosis line and the experiment under it. if i can swap in Product Hunt and it still reads true, i'd keep cutting.”
“I'm starting it now lol. I've had 3 conversations so far. So how did you fix it and what was the right balance?”
“fair enough, I didn’t realize you literally launched yesterday 😂 congrats man! And yeah distribution really does seem like the other half of building a product. I’m trying to learn that side myself now before I launch properly. I’ll hold you to that answer though 😂 come back later and tell me what surprised you once real users have had some time with it.”
“solid product but yeah launch is the hardest part. not sure if you've heard of x-radio.fm but they broadcast stories from indie builders live on air, might help get your name out there passively while you keep shipping. ymmv but worth a look”
“This is such a great reminder that building a product and building a business are two very different things. It's so easy to get caught up in building because it's the part we can control.”
“Do you really need all that at your stage? This is the time to learn your market, users, product, etc and find what does and does not work. I understand trying to move quick but don't skip important steps since those may likely hurt more than if you had gone slow at first”
“hey folks, i was playing around with some TTS models, and ended up creating a live radio station :P X-Radio.FM just runs. a host reads out stuff founders posted, launches, first sales, rough weeks, and plays lofi in between. no episode list, no play button, whatever's on is on. nice to leave open while you work. if you're a builder and are interested in being up to date with what's going on in the builders/makers scene, you need to check this out. folks stop scrolling, start listenin”
“building without a list or followers is tough. a lot of launches flop because the founder assumes word of mouth will just happen. reaching out to a few early testers who might genuinely care can change that. finding those connections is key to turning silence into responses.”
“But there are a lot of competitors or tangentially related competitors in the spaces/near spaces with lots of features. I don't want to just build slowly 1 feature at a time. I do understand the implications of building features no one wants, but if a competitor has built the feature there may be some validated demand for it already?”
“you said you posted on a couple of subreddits and got crickets. i want to push on how you posted rather than where, becuase i ran what was accidentally a controlled experiment on this and the result was not subtle. same product, same week, two subs. one post was the normal thing, heres what i built, heres what it does. it got 0 points and 2 comments and died. the other one i opened by saying this might not even belong here so mods feel free to nuke it, heres the thing, please tell me whats wrong”
“I don’t want to ask anyone for free work—I genuinely value the skills and time spent learning them, that’s why I took this on trying to do it myself until I have funds to invest. I’m incredible proud of the foundation I’ve built and the whole build, I’m just embarrassed that I’m not capable of actually writing the code myself right now and built it all with AI.”
Bro great work people are just being cynical to be cynical in here
“Really I saw the .lol name and was like people are really taking a lol domain seriously, so you 100% could be right I’m just to worried about longevity you know”
“Haha, fair!! What about the actual development,what part was most challenging?”
“these sorts of projects are great until they get too big and then they also become faceless evil legalese money generators I don't think I will support any sort of start up ever again until I see extremely robust mission principles and philosophy baked into the company, and I dont mean a 'dont be evil' slogan”
“What's the one yc shaped proof point you think you'd actually have by the time they look at it, revenue, retention, or just a pile of active users? I've seen a lot of teams, including mine when I was overthinking way too much, get stuck treating yc like the goal instead of the evidence trail, and that usually gets messy fast.”
“the framing of iteration speed as the real moat is spot on, but i'd push on one thing: faster loops only help if the feedback you're cycling on is honest. most early feedback is polite noise, so the bottleneck isn't generating 20 hypotheses, it's identifying which 2 are worth the next cycle.”
“Okay so, if you’re a short form person, okay with videos, build in public on Instagram. And if you’re more into long form content and like sharing thoughts, do Substack”
Currently, I am building an AI dating app based on loopholes of existing ones and trying to understand dating problems.
“the first 100 mostly prove you can get attention, not that you have a growth channel, so i'd focus on why those users came back and build around that before chasing Product Hunt or more random promos”
“Some of them actually created reminders. But it is still too early and I am improving this day by day thanks to you people who give me actual honest feedback.”
“10 first paid users outside of the FFF[F] is the hardest part by a landslide. Building has never been the hard part, it's even less now with AI but it's never been to begin with. Most devs can build a product to achieve a given purpose, you just sit on a chair and code like a brainless automated robot, no suprise that it was the entry point of AI into tech. What people fail again and again until they despair is acquiring customers. The average builder is so clueless about acquisition tha”
“been there with the 'build first, figure out marketing later' trap. one thing that helped me was validating the idea before writing code — running polls with actual founders in the niche to see if anyone would pay. might be worth a look before your next project. ymmv.”
“stick a price on a landing page before you build. everyone will tell you the idea's great right up until you ask for their card. And for me, I just go for mvp and see if it's actually useful for myself.”
“Apparently until you build something building is harder but once you build it getting the 1st 10 users is 10 times harder”
“I see - for that you need to go “viral” 😄 You need to “smartly” put your App in front of people via Social Media - mainly by educational (teaches them about product benefits) and funny (gets reach faster) content. Offer some benefits to a person referring your App and the person being referred to (an instant cash-back of $5 or something on 1st transaction to both). A person referring to multiple people should receive cashbacks for every 1st transaction the other does.”
I've been working on a SaaS called Fantazina , a platform that lets anyone create and run their own custom fantasy football league. The idea is to give league managers one place…
“Trick is targeting people who are already complaining publicly, not messaging at random: 1. Where to find them: Search Reddit, Twitter, or G2 2-star reviews for "[Competitor] alternative" or "hate doing [specific task]". People who wrote on angry post love talking about it. 2. How to not get ignored: - Never ask for a "15 minute call" upfront (sounds like a sales pitch). - Explicitly state you have nothing to sell - Ask one simple question about their current workar”
“hey everyone i've been wanting to build a saas for a while but every idea i came up with was either already done to death or something nobody actually asked for. so this time i'm flipping it around and starting from a real problem instead. so let me ask you directly, what's the most annoying thing you deal with in your work or business that software still hasn't fixed? could be anything. invoicing, scheduling, client follow ups, reporting, tracking stuff in spreadsheets, whatever”
“you might just be seeing a builder-heavy feed tbh, follow people in the industries you want to sell to and youll see way more problems than launch posts”
“Search the people who are having this as a pain point now.. imo there are sooo many new startups coming up.. you can talk to them for a free trial and paid version later.. You will find a lot of them on reddit..”
“u/tmaleh would love to take a look at the product. This after seeing LinkedIn flooded with comments on how pitch decks are walls of text, generated with Claude etc. I think this comes from presenters not understanding some very human constraints. How limitation on time, attention spans, cognitive overload, skimming text, minimal or no outside context affect the audience. It's almost like a UX issue, but related to humans brains - the founders are unable to interface with the audience. And th”
“We all gets ideas about dream startup but don't know how to execute it. What's your that idea 💡 submitted by /u/one_person_unicorn [link] [comments]”
Just launched a new saasdirectory for founders after failing 4 products. Feeling dumb for now 😅😅
“yeah thats a fair concern, especially with something that auto-submits on your behalf”
“I hope you had a professional experienced with your architecture review the code and business logic, as well as an attorney make sure you aren't breaking any federal or state laws, and even more hopeful had a security expert perform a penetration test on your app and code. Over 30% of security breaches are due to non-technical individual using AI to code sensitive portions of an app that should be PCI DSS compliant as well as many, many other layers of compliancy to make sure that data and f”
“Makes perfect sense! Appreciate the vision. Will follow back up. Sincerely appreciate you”